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About · A 20-year arc

I figure things out by building them.

Twenty years and four companies of research-led design and product strategy, mostly for software that has to work at scale.

The arc

The plan was to go straight to Silicon Valley after grad school at Virginia Tech. It didn't work out that way: there was a design co-op in Gaithersburg and a few years at Lexmark in Lexington first, and those stops mattered more than I expected. Lexmark gave me a background in both hardware and software, which is what got me in the door at the Collaboration group at Cisco. I stayed over 13 years and learned most of what I know about leading design there. ServiceNow came next.

A stylized world map tracing a journey west in six numbered stops, matching the cards below. A dashed flight path runs from Chennai (stop one) up over Eurasia and the Atlantic to the eastern United States — Blacksburg, Virginia (two), Gaithersburg, Maryland (three), and Lexington, Kentucky (four) — then west across the continent to California: San Jose (five). Santa Clara (six) is nearby without a direct route line.
Chennai to California, in six stops — the numbers match the cards below.
1
Home

Chennai, India

  • Bhavan's alumnus
  • B.S., Chemical Engineering
  • Junior handyman & resident “Mr. Fixit”
  • Badminton, cricket & volleyball
2
Virginia Tech

Blacksburg, VA

  • M.S. in Human–Computer Interaction
  • Graduate assistant in two research labs: Digital Media & Cognitive Ergonomics
  • Thesis: in-lab vs. remote usability testing
3
GE GXS

Gaithersburg, MD

  • A year as a full-time design co-op
  • Designed UIs for web and desktop products across the GXS portfolio
4
Lexmark

Lexington, KY

  • Joined to design holistic systems across hardware & software
  • Multi-modal design for consumer & business multifunction devices + supporting software
  • Rapid design, prototyping & validation
5
Cisco

San Jose, CA

  • A decade-plus across Collaboration software & hardware: Webex, Devices, Contact Center, Calling
  • Co-drove product strategy & execution with cross-functional partners
  • Built, mentored & inspired high-impact design teams
6
ServiceNow

Santa Clara, CA

  • Led design & product strategy for the AI-native platform experience
  • Commissioned the cross-BU experience audit & library that anchored the strategy
  • AI Control Tower shipped as the first product

Who I am

Teacher-Influencer. Whiteboarder. Tinkerer.

Mentor to team and an influencer & trusted partner with the cross-functional teams. I love to break down complex systems into a visual to understand it first, and I like to build things myself. I treat learning — from others and from my own failures — as an ongoing journey that never quite ends. I believe in designing systems that scale, and I'm skeptical of designs that only work at small scale or with heroic effort.

The range

The work spanned very different kinds of users. Webex and its devices reached tens of millions of everyday people. The app and calling products served prosumers and IT-administered teams. ServiceNow's AI-native platform is a workflow system that runs across prosumer, public-sector, and enterprise settings. The common thread is that all of it started from research, whatever the audience or the stakes.

A breadth-of-work map plotting bodies of work across a four-zone audience spectrum: consumer-adjacent, prosumer, public sector, and enterprise. Collaboration Apps (Webex) span the full width; Devices and Headsets span consumer-adjacent through prosumer; Calling and Infrastructure spans prosumer to enterprise; Contact Center spans public sector to enterprise; São Paulo sits in the public-sector zone; the ServiceNow AI-native platform sits at the enterprise end. A mulberry bracket beneath them all reads: research-led design, the constant across all of it.
Work across the audience spectrum, from consumer-adjacent to enterprise.

Personal

Family of three. My wife is on the development side, so we joke the roles are swapped, and our sixteen-year-old is still deciding between photography and robotics. We're in Sunnyvale, in the early stages of a full home remodel: permits in hand, contractor signed, interior walls down, and the exterior demolition waiting on PG&E. It's become its own design project: I've been using AI tools for everything from laying out a garage utility closet around the whole house water filtration, purification and heating systems to 3D-modeling and rendering the inside and outside of the house. We love to travel and usually it is toward some form of water.

Taking a photo on a city rooftop
Canoeing on a turquoise lake with mountain peaks
Mudroom and utilities design sketches and render

Twenty years in, I still have to draw a system before I understand it. Right now that system is my home — built with the craft I've picked up along the way, just faster now with AI tools.